“The actual Chinese expression “Hearing something a hundred times isn’t better than seeing it once” (百闻不如一见, p bǎi wén bù rú yī jiàn) is sometimes introduced as an equivalent, as Watts‘s “One showing is worth a hundred sayings”.[6] This was published as early as 1966 discussing persuasion and selling in a book on engineering design.[7]”

Rockstor’s 5 git repositories visualised in just over 1.5 minutes.

The essence of Gource’s use, at least on a linux desktop, is to initially build from the code and then point the resulting binary at a copy of one’s repository. The wrinkle here is that Rockstor, akin to many projects, consists of multiple repositories:

“Sometimes it may be interesting to show the history of multiple projects in the same Gource animation.”

Thanks people.

This mini HowTo is essentially a re-telling of that page as applied to Rockstor’s 5 repositories. The hope is that this ‘telling’ might aid other multi-repo projects and save us all some time; at least on mass.

Building Gource

As of 8th September 2017 v0.47 was released which is the version I used here. Be sure to visit their releases page to check on availability of any newer releases. As always it’s best to resource the original text on install matters: please favour the projects own INSTALL doc over what I state here. But by way of completeness I’ll indicate how it worked for me:

There’s also a nice selection of mouse interactions such as jumping to any time point; although this does reset the graph. While paused one can inspect the details of individual files and users, and dragging with the left mouse button manually controls the camera. Centre button toggles tracking / entire tree view.

Note that as with the mouse ‘time jumps’ in the interactive mode covered earlier, using the “–start-date” option, as we have just done, results in no previous activity being displayed. That is, only files changed after the given date, and their respective repositories, will appear in the resulting Gource graph.